Landa’s dodgy stomach ends Team Sky’s hopes

Team Sky seem to be cursed at the Giro d’Italia. Another year passes and another failure from the general classification contender on the team.

Rigoberto Uran raced to second in 2013, but that’s very much been an anomaly for the team who are greatly funded by Sky Italia – they’re desperate to do well at this race but something always seems to go wrong.

Amador is a genuine contender for the maglia rosa

His descent from the top of the Plan del Falco – the penultimate climb of the stage – was pretty incredible. The road surface didn’t look great and there were some incredibly tough corners to negotiate, but the Costa Rican rider blazed it down the descent and opened up a sizeable gap to Vincenzo Nibali and Alejandro Valverde.

It looked at one stage that Amador was going to move into the pink jersey, sitting 30 seconds down overall, but in the end the chasing pack were only a couple of seconds behind him.

His teammate Valverde knows that Amador can win this race, so could the pair form a partnership like the Spaniard did with Nairo Quintana at the Tour de France in 2015?

Jungels will probably need more help than that when the mountains get up over 2000m later in the race, but it seems we can’t write him off yet.

The Giro d’Italia is not a bad place for your first career win

Giulio Ciccone on stage ten of the 2016 Giro d’Italia

As a young Italian, where else could you wish to get your first career win than in your first ever Giro d’Italia?

Bardiani-CSF’s Giulio Ciccone was understandably in tears as he crossed the line for the win in Sestola, having taken up the solo lead from the breakaway on the final climb and beaten two older campaigners in Damiano Cunego (Nippo-Vini Fantini) and his own teammate Stefano Pirazzi.

Pirazzi played his part in the win, almost taking out Cunego on the descent before the final climb, allowing Ciccone spin away to the win. The first of many? I expect so.

He said before the race that he was only here for the time trials, but then he started wearing the pink jersey. We had the talk about whether he could win the overall and then he cracked on stage eight.

The stage nine time trial wasn’t good for him, as he was still suffering from the problems and the saddle sore from the previous day. The sore didn’t heal as much as he would have liked on the rest day, leaving him uncomfortable for another day.

Anyone who’s had a saddle sore will know the last thing you want to do is go for another ride while it’s still causing you bother, so a 227km stage on Wednesday won’t be particularly appealing.

Connect with us

Get our free email newsletter

Your email address:

By submitting your details, you will also receive emails from Time Inc. UK, publisher of Cycling Weekly and other iconic brands about its goods and services, and those of its carefully selected third parties. Please tick here if you’d prefer not to hear about:

Time Inc.'s goods & services, including all the latest news, great deals and offers